I had delivered to my doorstep this morning on this cold, clear Sunday a near-perfect White House press release, courtesy of Chicago Tribune. It begins with a straightforward lede, of press-office quality:
From front to back and on nearly every page, President Barack Obama’s new budget plan delivers a message that’s seldom been heard in American politics for more than three decades: It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share and lighten the load on the middle class.
“Seldom . . . for more than three decades” jars. Maybe “in” the last three decades?
And “in American politics”? She’s kidding. The left wing has been silent on the subject?
Let’s not quibble, however. At issue is whether Maura has that Chris Matthews tingle going up (and down) her leg or legs. Consider her declaration that “the new budget would [? in what circumstance?] focus [she means “bestow”?] more benefits on ordinary Americans and look to the affluent for more help in paying for them.
Thanks be to God!
The budget “lays out the facts starkly,” she says. Since Reagan cut taxes, “lower-class incomes have stagnated, middle-class incomes have increased only slightly, . . . the incomes of the richest Americans have skyrocketed.
That’s it. O. said it, it must be so. No independent verification needed for this fan. It’s in the budget book.
“If the country is going to recover from this economic crisis, Obama argues, that is going to have to change,” she writes.
And who is she to argue? She quotes him: The nation “has grown and prospered when all Americans have shared in the opportunities created by our economy.” Or, gosh darn it, to cut through the standard Obama overwriting, people have profited when the nation has prospered.
And oh my, get that “have shared in the opportunities.” He’s for equal opportunity, apparently. Probably not.
O. is “gearing up for a fight” with his all-purpose bad guys, “special interests and lobbyists” (though not with the lobbyists he has recently hired).
So is Maura. “To be sure,” she writes, “some Republicans denounced the shift in priorities as class warfare.” Some. (And all but three rejected the recently steamrollered spending bill.}
Moreover, “some economists” said higher taxes “could” reduce rich people’s “entrepreneurial energy.” Come on. She means would dry up investing.
“Many economists, on the other hand,” don’t think so. They say overall and middle-class prosperity have happened simultaneously. No kidding. “During the economic boom that followed World War II, income inequalities eased as the middle class prospered.” Really. Inequality didn’t increase when the middle class prospered?
“And those in the upper income brackets were heavily taxed” in this period, she says, again equating simultaneity with causation. Anyhow, “most wealthy Americans found ways to shelter much of their income from the highest rates.” In which case, what’s the point of raising their rates?
She found two of the many at the Brookings Institution, which Christian Science Monitor recently called “centrist” but Seattle Times called “left-leaning” (which I have found more common). Pay your money, take your choice. Maura takes a pass.
Obama will “undo the Bush tax cuts,” one of the two explains. He is Roberton Williams, of the Tax Policy Center, a Brookings operation, though Maura does not say so.
“Obama wants to help people afford college,” Williams told her. “His focus is on . . . long-term investment potential and have major, major social benefits.” Sure, like crushing deficits to be paid off by generations to come.
It is indeed a two-headed monster, this budget: presumably an economy-helper and definitely a social-welfare promoter. In any case, O. demonstrates a “laserlike focus on bolstering the middle class as a long-needed correction,” she writes, allowing that “others see in it the seeds of new inequalities.”
One of these would be the (right-leaning) Heritage Foundation fellow, who has two paragraphs at the end in which to state his case if not make it. He makes a key point point, that almost half the citizenry will pay no taxes in the Obama scheme of things. If he went further and noted that demagogues, I mean Democrats, will have the electorate where it wants it in that case, Maura ignored it. If he didn’t, he should have, because Obama is on the way to locking in the non-taxpayer majority for future elections from now forever more.
That’s the politics of it. I do not expect Maura and Chi Trib or LA Times to buy into that version. I do expect them to do more than provide for us hard-copy breakfast-table readers an almost entirely White House version.
Something had to be there to snuggle next to the 9–by-18–inch Macy’s ad on page 7, section 1, final edition, delivered to my doorstep, and Maura Reynolds supplied the supporting copy, as the ad people say. That was not her doing, of course. But really, John Kass can’t carry the whole paper, can he?
Blithe Spirit 